Anti-Lucretian preferences

Lucretius famously argued that non-existence at the end of one’s life is no more to be feared than non-existence before the beginning of one’s life. Nagel famously argued that there is an asymmetry. One could exist later than one will but one couldn’t have existed earlier than one did. I think he’s barking up the wrong tree. Death wouldn’t be less scary if it turned out to be metaphysically inevitable.

But in any case, I think there is a way to prescind from the metaphysics questions. You’ve just woken up after an operation. You have amnesia. You expect the amnesia to wear off—somehow you have knowledge of how such things go. But for now you have it. You look through some files a careless actuary left lying about. You expect one of these files is about you. The files describe these cases:

• 35:20. Thirty-five-year-old expected to live twenty years more.

• 30:20. Thirty-year-old expected to live twenty years more.

• 20:30. Twenty-year-old expected to live thirty years more.

• 30:30. Thirty-year-old expected to live thirty years more.

• 20:20. Twenty-year-old expected to live twenty years more.

You can’t, of course, choose which of these is you, but you can have hopes and preferences. And suppose you think there is no afterlife.

My own preferences would be:

• 30 : 30 > 20 : 30 > 35 : 20 > 30 : 20 > 20 : 20.

I consistently have a preference for a longer future other things being equal, and a longer past other things being equal, but I tend to prefer a longer future to a longer past even if that results in a somewhat shorter overall life.

But only to a point. Suppose another file is:

• 50:28.

I definitely would greatly prefer that over 20:30, and not insignificantly over 30:30. The reason is that it seems quite a lot better to live 78 years than 50 or 60, even at the cost of two years of future life.

In any case, as regards my own preferences, Lucretius is just wrong. I would want more of a past life. Though to some degree my intuitions are distorted by the thought that in a longer life I am more likely to have more meaningful achievements.

What worries me philosophically about all this is whether I can reconcile my preferences with my belief in the B-theory of time. I think I can. It makes sense to me that the preferences I have at t should have a relationship to where t is located in my life.